


(the moments i deem worthy of the worst things that i've done)

by paperclipbitch



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen, Post-Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 16:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/420965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Apocalypse!AU. <i>“Anyone but you,” he mumbles sometimes when he’s feeling cruel and there’s nothing left to burn.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	(the moments i deem worthy of the worst things that i've done)

**Author's Note:**

> [first posted on LJ May 2011] No explicit major character death, but no promises that everyone's survived either. Written post season two. Title from _Oh Glory_ by Panic! At The Disco.

_If I wake in the morning  
I only need two more miracles to be a saint._  
– Panic! At The Disco

 

“You ever think we’re the ones here because we can talk our way out of anything?” Puck asks, dying on a Tuesday afternoon, ten miles from the nearest truck stop and the engine _screaming_.

Blaine can hear begging on the radio underneath the crackling static of yet another irrelevant pop song talking about summer and parties and boys with bad smiles, all part of a world that ended somewhere between the blood on the kitchen floor and the news reporters running from their cameras with blankness in their eyes.

“I think,” he says carefully, because Puck seems to be waiting for an answer and Puck doesn’t question _anything_ anymore, “I think we can talk our way _into_ anything.”

Puck’s laughter cracks in the middle and there’s a clunking noise from the exhaust that feels like a gunshot.

“Not a ‘no’,” he says, and reaches to turn the blurring radio up.

-

Blaine doesn’t know how long they’ve been running; time bears no relation anymore with the sun burning everything and the only indication of it passing is Puck’s mohawk growing out – so maybe fashion gods still exist even if the real one seems to have run for it – and the stripes of lobster red burns on Blaine’s skin evening out to something that doesn’t hurt like a bitch, pouring cans of 7Up down his forearms like it would ease anything in a shot out bathroom.

Everything tastes like dust and periodically like blood and there’s a blazer in the backseat with a gunshot hole through the left shoulder and that’s a story Blaine’s never telling because it’s not one he _can_ tell. 

Nobody wins anymore and when he falls asleep in the passenger seat he kind of expects to wake up dead or at the very least abandoned with Puck’s _fuck I can’t do this anymore_ written in empty miles of dirt road.

“Anyone but you,” he mumbles sometimes when he’s feeling cruel and there’s nothing left to burn, and Puck always laughs and says _well, you weren’t my first choice either_.

Blaine’s never been anyone’s first choice except for the time that he was and God, that one still makes him cry when he has the luxury of time.

-

Jesse St James and his snarl of a smile still haunt them sometimes, four a.m. and not sleeping and the sky burning like it’s midday, like it’s eternal daylight and there’s no darkness anymore because no one’s afraid of it, no one’s afraid of anything anymore because that all got stripped away.

Blaine’s sunglasses have a crack in the left lens and they’re cheap drugstore plastic and he thinks Puck might’ve taken them off a corpse for him but the lack of confirmation keeps him wearing them. Waste not, want not, and the cut of these jeans is so bad that Blaine’s _glad_ Kurt’s not here to see them, not here to see the fashion _wreckage_ that is his life now. He can’t remember the last time he brushed his teeth and his nails are all broken and he’s made up of bruises and dirty skin and the last vestiges of his voice, which hasn’t given in yet though everything else feels like it has.

“We could’ve taken him with us,” Blaine sighs eventually, because he doesn’t sleep anymore and Puck’s got this scar that makes him look like the worst kind of Bond villain because he’s still beautiful with it.

Puck stays silent because there have been enough snaps of _don’t_ between them, enough of the _aren’t things hard enough without you looking back_ s, enough of the _do you really want to push this and see it through?_ s and they’ve worked the worst of them out of their systems. Everything comes with glitches nowadays though, even with iphones looking like the most bitter joke and no one knows who runs the radio stations because anything that looked like an infrastructure collapsed first.

“He’ll be fine,” Puck says, with enough belief in his voice for it not to sound like an excuse or like denial. “He’ll be fine, and he’ll be fucking _angry_ when he catches us up.”

-

Blaine’s got a scar on his right knuckle from Puck’s teeth. It was a stupid plan and a highway in the middle of nowhere, living on warm Gatorade and beef jerky and the cruellest parody of a roadtrip, and in the end they snapped and he couldn’t think of any other response to _you were running before we even fucking left_ because that sounded too much like blame for comfort.

-

It’s not about trust, it’s not even about like, and though there’s no deep-seated issues anywhere – _hey_ , Puck shrugged when Blaine eventually asked about it, _the sky’s falling into damn pieces, everything’s rainbow-coloured now, it’s almost like you guys won_ and while that kind of made Blaine angry it made him relieved too – and they’re here because they’re still alive and a lot of people aren’t. Or maybe they’re just missing, because there were a lot of cellars and basements and shelters and when Kurt eventually stopped picking up the phone one day it could’ve meant anything.

It started up as a one-upmanship, Blaine with a shotgun propped against his knee and Puck laughing because he was the one holding the ammunition, it started out with competitions of pain, of _I want you to hurt like I hurt only not as much because I want to be the one suffering more here, I want my cross to be bigger than yours, and fuck, but that’s a different kind of competition to the ones in the locker rooms_ and then when _I don’t know where my first love is_ turned into _I don’t know where any of my first loves are_ and by the time they’d skidded past _everyone was your first love_ and screamed each other hoarse on _I’ve got a goddamn daughter out there somewhere_ there was something like camaraderie. The feeling you get when someone’s seen you at the kind of worst that ends in the smell of gunpowder and in crushed coke cans and bodies in the road.

“If we get out of this alive I’m going to have to kill you,” Blaine muses when they’re doing something that neither of them wants to call looting, because it’s not like the store owners are ever coming back.

“Not if I kill you first,” Puck responds. His smile is _gleaming_.

-

Blaine was charming once and confident once and felt like he had the world in his hands, teenage angst be damned, and everything fitted in exactly where it was supposed to and when it didn’t fit he dated it and that made a kind of sense too.

“I banged half of Lima,” is Puck’s only response to that kind of thinking, a crude hand gesture at his torn jeans, and it would be easy to write him off and Blaine doesn’t because Puck is the only reason they’re both alive right now because he’s more ruthless than anyone Blaine’s ever known and he got them out when Blaine was still hoping a smile would be enough to get him a tank of gas.

They harmonise with songs on the radio and pretend they don’t, and there’s a guitar missing a string that they both fight over that lives in the trunk along with ammunition and thirty-eight cans of Red Bull; who needs water anymore when most of it’s diseased and the rest of it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Puck puts most of this down to computer games, and Blaine wants to believe him.

-

The last time Blaine saw Kurt alive he was naked and both of them were crying and their hands were shaking and both of them made a lot of promises that neither of them were ever going to be able to keep and it didn’t feel like the ridiculous teenage fumbling it was supposed to be with Gaga spitting about teeth on the stereo because it was either sexy or so kitsch it fit and neither of them could choose, and upstairs Finn was deciding who he needed to call and had anyone seen Rachel recently anyway?

Blaine had a broken bottle to his wrist the first time those memories resurfaced; Puck dragged it out of his grip, cutting both their hands like some kind of twisted oath, and spat _they don’t get_ Vanity Fair _subscriptions in hell anyway_ , and Blaine said a lot of things he didn’t mean and a lot of things he did, alternating between sobbing and yelling, starting from _I don’t know what to do now I’m not pretty anymore_ and ending with _the world is fucking ending and I still don’t want to kiss you how do you feel about me now?_ and Puck threw the piece of bottle away and waited until he’d stopped.

They found band-aids in a rest-stop bathroom and patched each other’s hands up and Puck eventually settled it with _of course you want to kiss me everyone wants to kiss me_ and Blaine assured him he’d shoot him first and it’s kind of funny without being funny at all.

-

“I never made out with Rachel Berry,” Puck says, and they both grin at each other before downing shots.

“For someone with _that_ taste in fashion she sure got around a lot,” Blaine muses, and then wonders if it’s tasteless to say that about someone who may or may not be dead.

Uncertainty’s an alibi and Blaine’s always been able to get away with a hint of a smile and a wink. He may not have started a shady cleaning business based around casual prostitution, but then the dads of Lima left a lot to be desired, and anyway he had the clean-cut boy-next-door defence that Puck never could carry off.

“Don’t be such a fucking martyr,” Puck says, pouring out sloppy measures of cheap tequila that might kill them if the world doesn’t get to them first, and outside the fields are burning and that’s yet another stateline left behind them. No one ever says _where are we going?_

“I never had a skincare regime,” Blaine snaps back, because he wants to win this, and if winning means having to stay up all night while Puck pukes up that alcohol they’re not even old enough to drink then so be it, he’ll take what he can get these days.

Puck’s expression is nothing short of murderous, and he licks his lips as he carefully enunciates: “I never made out with Jesse St James,” in a tone of calculated poison.

“Stealing the car and _leaving you to die_ ,” Blaine spits at him and downs the shot because that’s a long dark story that’s actually really short and his Warblers blazer was intact at the start of it.

“Oh, ‘cause we’ve never done that before,” Puck laughs, sharp and hollow, and both of them are kind of stupid and kind of masochistic and Puck pours them both two more shots because who’s to say what’s actually the game anymore?

-

Running _to_ , running _from_ , and little things like regionals and sectionals and choreography seem so tired now, childhood games of things that don’t really matter when your friends are dying and the news is full of screaming. Blaine’s head hurts with all of it and no one really wrote an album about this because no one could ever have predicted how this _feels_.

“I’ve made a list of people I’m going to sue if I get out of this alive,” Puck announces, car bumping viciously over the cracked asphalt of a blazing hot highway leading to nowhere, and Blaine’s sunglasses have been upgraded to something with a _label_ and he’s still not asking. “It starts with you.”

“Bring it on,” Blaine sighs, leaning back in his seat and propping his splitting sneakers on the dashboard, a thousand breaking lives left behind him and nowhere left to run, “bring it the fuck _on_.”

-


End file.
